Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2000-172248 by the inventor of the present invention is known as a three-dimensional display controlling apparatus that provides a comfortable environment for browsing an electronic document with hypertext structure on a display unit. In this invention, an electronic document group with hypertext structure is arranged in a single virtual space based on its like structure, a display image to browse the electronic document is generated based on a view defined in the virtual space and displayed at the display unit. Moreover, in accordance with an instruction by a user, a view is consecutively changed so as to consecutively generate and display the display image at the display unit at real time based on the view at the time. Thereby, the user can browse a document by following links of hypertext so as to consecutively enlarge the document, while the user consecutively changes the view in the virtual space.
A variation example of a display screen is shown in FIG. 1. An electronic document 602 is linked by the hypertext structure from an electronic document 601, and further an electronic document 603 is linked. A screen example 62 is displayed by zooming in from a state of a screen example 61, and further a screen example 63 is displayed by zooming in.
On the other hand, a method has already been devised in that the three-dimensional product catalog is distributed through the Internet, and the three-dimensional shape is displayed at a terminal side while the three-dimensional shape is being rotated or a like on a screen by the operation of the user. It is called a Web3D as a typical method in that the three-dimensional shape such as a product is distributed from a server on the Internet to a user terminal in a VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) form or a special form, and the three-dimensional shape is displayed on the screen at the user terminal by a program for displaying such as three-dimensional shape. A display object is selected by selecting an item by using a mouse on an HTML document displayed at a general WWW browser. That is, the program is to display a single three-dimensional shape. Also, the program is realized as a plug-in of a browser. A Java™ program, or an ActiveX object.
However, in a conventional three-dimensional display controlling apparatus as described above, there are problems described below.
In the conventional three-dimensional display controlling apparatus, the single three-dimensional shape can be displayed, rotated, and partially enlarged in a window of the browser. Therefore, before the shape is displayed, it is needed to click an option by the mouse, select a menu, conduct a search condition in order to select the display object.